Canon 9900F review

The Canon 9900F scanner

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35mm scans with the 9900F.

As luck would have it my Nikon Coolscan has ceased to function, perhaps I should have been kinder to it in my Epson review. However, I have a few scans which I can use to compare, with full apology for using the same test shot as in my other review, but never mind at least you will be able to see the images from all three scanners side by side.


Nikon Coolscan at 2700 dpi	Canon 9900F at 2700 dpi

Nikon detail at 100%	Canon detail at 100% - no USM

Epson 3200 detail with USM	Canon 9900F detail with USM

I have scanned the Guard picture at the lower resolution of 2700 so you could compare the result against the Nikon LS-1000, a dedicated film scanner. The file size is 26.8 mb and the scan took 3 minutes 40 seconds to complete.

The next scans are made at full resolution, the maximum optical resolution is 3200 which produced a file size of approx 37 mb. (Mounted slide). Although I made colour corrections in ScanGear, but the colours that were displayed in Photoshop were not the same as on the preview. This makes the task of achieving accurate colour within the scan near impossible. To add to the exasperation, the Colour setting in the Preferences panel are all greyed out for film scanning, which means you can't use a scanner profile or work in your chosen colour space. The ScanGear curves, Histogram and colour adjustments are still available this should be enough to make a rough colour estimate. I colour corrected the image below in Photoshop and have included a before and after at the bottom. The 37 mb scan took 3 minutes 10 seconds, if you are wondering why a 2700 dpi took 3 min 40 sec and this larger resolution did it 30 seconds faster. The answer is that one is landscape and the other is portrait format, the landscape has a shorter scan head pass.


Full resolution scan at 3200 dpi

USM applied in Photoshop	scan with no USM

USM selected in ScanGear	Nikon Coolscan no USM

Shadow detail is all there	Highlight detail - whiter than white

Best colour with ScanGear	Tweaked in Photoshop (+15 M)

I can't stress high enough the need to apply UnSharpMask to your scans. Although the Canon ScanGear USM has given a reasonable result here, the settings are far too basic for a professional scanner, they are either on or off. It would be better to turn off USM before a scan and apply it in Photoshop or other imaging application. Canon didn't supply me with the D max value for this scanner, but looking at the washed out highlight details on the guards belt I will take a guess and say it was in the region of 3.1. The dark bearskins have kept the detail and look quite good. The final samples show the best result I could achieve in ScanGear (it took 5 scans to get to this stage). I tweaked the image in Photoshop by adding 15 Magenta in the selective colour adjustment (10 may have been better).

Putting 35mm film into a flatbed scanner and expecting comparable results to a film scanner is a tall order. The 9900F has given results that I would have expected from any transparency adaptor and as such it doesn't disappoint. For presentation or web work, the 35mm scanning option might do, but for quality printed work perhaps not.